Six crows, seven sneezes, and Saturday's flowers for Wednesday's child
by Gray Glube
Summary: Superstition and caution only go as far as stupidity allows.
1. Chapter 1

**Title:** Six crows, seven sneezes, and Saturdays flowers for Wednesday's child

**Author:** grayglube

**Summary:** Superstition and caution only go as far as stupidity allows.

**Rating:** M

**Warning(s)/Kink(s):** Language, violence, sexual situations, elements of non-con and dub-con, necrophilia

* * *

It had started as a joke. All fun and games until someone poked their eye out. It's not funny anymore. And they aren't laughing now.

Black candles around a Ouija board, a neighborhood stray, booze, a bad girl, a good girl, a bitch, and a virgin.

Halloween night and naked skin.

The fixings of the all American sleepover meeting extracurricular club of the occult.

Stephanie, Chloe, Leah, and Her.

It's the modern day movie remake of The Craft.

It was a coincidental beginning. Running into each other in some sitcom comedy scene of a situation afterschool.

She came in to buy patchouli candles for her mom's birthday and Stephanie was already there looking at her own reflection while she held an earring up to the side of her face.

Leah came in as per her own usual routine to have Billy Dean do a card reading for her. Violet nods back with an eye roll when Leah smirks at her. She's asked Violet to come with her before and she'd scoffed and said it wasn't her thing, palm readings and crystal ball bullshit. But still, it's funny to Leah to see her here.

Chloe's been a wreck for the entire week at school since her grandmother kicked it, been out for three days for the wake and the funeral. She's waiting for Billy Dean to finish up with Leah. Violet is standing at the glass counter by the register while the store girl pulls out another velveted jewelry tray at Stephanie's request.

"What do you think?" Stephanie turns and holds up two dangling earrings for judgment.

"I prefer gold."

"Argh, I hate it." Stephanie groans dramatically. "I don't know which I like better."

"Get them both."

"Yeah…" she sighs, "maybe."

Violet's already seen Chloe edging closer towards them, looking out of place and splotchy faced. She's a mess, she doesn't care. Violet knows that Greek women beat themselves and cry hysterically at funerals, maybe, she read it somewhere. Widows tear off their dresses and savagely beat their breasts, somewhere at some time, over the death of their man or their sons, throwing themselves at the coffin. Self-immolation is tried and true. Cannibalism. The silt of her mind is swirling with every strange footnote or television portrayal of burial customs.

"The opal looks really pretty," Chloe tells Stephanie, meek and shiny faced. "Hey, Chloe. How are you doing?"

"Pretty shitty."

"Condolences," Violet says as the shop girl rings her up.

"Yeah, thanks."

Violet turns to pay and swings the bag off the counter, it's heavy.

"What are you doing right now?" Stephanie asks, looking at Chloe, "I starving, do you wanna come with me, out to eat or something. I hate going to diner by myself," she turns to Violet, "you can come too, obviously."

Chloe sniffles wetly and blows her nose into a tissue, looking furtively around for a garbage can and finding none just holds the dirty tissue tightly in her fist, "I just wanted to…it's stupid, but I just wanna see if…you know. If this shit is real, I want to…you know." She waves a hand around as if it's supposed to help.

"Leah says she's for real. She's being told her future." Violet tells her.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. It shouldn't be that long. She's been in there like fifteen minutes already."

"Do you and Leah want to go eat?" Stephanie asks.

"Yeah, I'll go. You wanna wait for Leah?"

"Yeah, why not. Even if she is a huge fucking bitch."

"Uh-huh."

Chloe looks between the two of them and then coughs a little in her throat, she looks like shit. "What's going on in English?"

"Another quiz, test is tomorrow. You coming tomorrow?" Stephanie answers.

"I don't know yet."

"Text me and I'll let you know what's on it."

"Thanks."

Leah flounces out with the beaded curtain jingling and smacking against the empty doorframe in quick small snaps, "Hey, what's with the powwow?" She grins wide and white.

"How'd it go?"

"Vague. Cryptic." To Violet. "How was the funeral?" To Chloe.

"Awful."

"Yeah, sorry about your grandma."

"Thanks. Do I just go back there and ask for a reading?"

"Uh-huh. But sometimes it's not a good time and she'll ask you to come back. You going to try to talk to her? Your grandma?"

"Yeah."

"Billy said there was someone trying to get her attention. Maybe it was her."

"Maybe."

"Good luck."

"Thanks." Chloe is walking away and turning back to shuffle a step forward, "Are you going to be at the diner for awhile?"

"Yeah, should be. Why?"

"I'll meet you there, okay?"

Stephanie nods in affirmation. Leah scowls and laughs, "What? You assholes are going to the diner?"

"Yeah, you coming?" Violet pushes her.

"Uh, _yes_ bitch." She pushes back.

Violet puts on her best Kill Bill impression, "Splendid."

"Come on let's go. I'm hungry!"

"Okay, okay."

"Did Billie really have a ghost at her pottery wheel?"

"No. Sometimes you have to lie to make people feel better about themselves."

"You are _such_ a good person."

"Shut the fuck up, bitch."

* * *

It's the four of them. Leah's in her formal choir get-up, starched whites and pressed blacks, earrings out and no vampy lipstick-nail combo. She looks like a girl instead of a super bitch. Violet and Stephanie are still in uniform, little differences and in some sort of slovenly disarray. Chloe's pale inside her black dress and black stockings and black shoes and black sweater. A preschool shadow silhouette.

Leah does breakfast at five in the afternoon, Stephanie cheese and sauce, Chloe rabbit food, and Violet eats the picked over extras with too much condiment.

It didn't go well for Chloe. Billie Dean told her some spirits need time to transition to their new plane of existence and it may be awhile before dead grandma wants to talk. Chloe is disappointed and glum the entire time.

Leah wants to do something for Halloween.

Violet wants more fries.

Stephanie laments her painful menses.

Leah says they'll be synched up by the end of the meal most likely and they all laugh about the wide availability of hysto-wifi.

* * *

Leah's dad owns the Terror Tour franchise in L.A. and they've been branching out. They bought the house that's a 'realtor's worst fucking nightmare' according to Leah. They call it the Murder House. Murder-Suicide couples, dead babies, dismembered children, sorority house slayings, suicide by cop following the high school shooting spectacular of the last decade as the ones they knew about. There was a skeleton in the backyard that Leah said wasn't found until they were making the outside lounge. The discovery had halted the opening.

Because the Halloween party they had planned as an opening night can't happen and because Leah's dad has never enforced a reward system for his daughter based off of anything that requires real work they make plans to get shit-faced and play slumber party in the Murder House

It's fucking perfect.

Bad mojo and dark energy, Leah had said. Weekly sessions with Billy Dean have turned her mind to mush and superstitious bullshit.

They pass around a bottle of gin and get a buzz going, their version of electricity passing through linked hands. They light candles and get ready. No one's quite comfortable enough to be completely naked, but eventually everyone's seen everyone else's tits because of the need to compare size and loose robes and they can move the fuck on.

Leah reads Tarot Cards with a book that explains how to do it.

The two of cups comes up for Violet. Stephanie grows increasingly bored with a sound-loop of loud sighs and nails tapping on the wood floor in a rapid rhythm.

Everything's silly, the Ouija board spells out 'I-M-C-O-L-D-N-E-E-D-B-L-O-O-' courtesy the spirit of Leah's warped sense of humor and then trails off with Violet's help to continue with 'H-O-T-P-U-S-S-Y'

She isn't allowed to smoke in the house. They all accompany her out and a stray cat from the next yard over takes over everyone's interest.

"Hot pussy, bitch." She thinks it's hilarious, Leah hiccups around a wet laugh and Chloe burps a little. The cat follows along and they coo over it until Chloe tells Leah that the only chalk she could find was sidewalk chalk and Violet almost ditches, Stephanie takes another pull off the bottle and calls her a little bitch, Leah says it will be fun and Chloe just frowns and looks weepy drunk at her with big eyes.

They sit inside what Leah calls the circle of protection drawn in purple.

Violet's too drunk to put her pants on, let alone leave, so she stays, ready to summon Chloe's dead grandmother. It just happens to turn out that everyone else has something else in mind. Violet makes a quick apology to the dead grandmother while Stephanie draws a dick on the wood floor in absent minded drunkenness.

They write what they want on pieces of paper and burn them on four candles. Stephanie wants fame, Chloe wants recognition, Leah wants everything, and what she wants is clichéd for a reason.

Stephanie drinks herself sick and vomits all over herself and while Violet is trying to find a towel and something else for her to wear Chloe kills the stray with the heavy gin bottle. She hears the heavy_ thunk, thunk, thunk_ on the floor and the caterwauling of kitty cat death. When she comes back with a towel limp in her hand Leah's cutting her own hand, leg, and tit. There's a lot of blood and Violet has to pull off a patch job in the bathtub, they aren't deep but Leah looks manic, she admits that she did a line of coke.

Violet tells her that she's nuts.

Leah explains the need for sacrifice as Billie Dean so helpfully put it.

Violet stays awake, Leah is scary and Violet isn't sleeping anywhere near her while she's rolling through a high that makes her want to self-mutilate for the sake of sacrificial voodoo hoodo pseudo witchcraft spell circles.

She helps Chloe get rid of the dead cat, a garbage bag spun around and around and tied tight and off to the curbside dump truck pick-up. Leah fucks around in the kitchen making a sandwich and Stephanie is sleeping off her intoxication upstairs.

Chloe apologizes for the cat and climbs the stairs to tuck herself in and make sure Stephanie has a garbage can within spewing distance complaining of her heavy buzz the whole way up.

Leah smokes a cigarette and eats her peanut butter and kosher dill pickle slice sandwich outside in the portico.

Violet goes in to clean up the chalk lines and blow out the candles. She's drunk. Holding a hand on the wall as she walks to ease the sway in her steps. The sponge leaves a drip trail as she goes. As she crouches to erase the evidence of purple Crayola chalk, penis caricatures, and tabby blood the glass doors slam shut behind her and she almost shits her pants. She yells out at Leah.

She leans back on her haunches and turns to fast, her gorge rises and she tastes the sour quinine of tonic water.

Leah isn't on the other side of the glass panels, the candles blow out and something is touching her hair, then something snags on it she almost breaks the doors to the room when she slams them shut behind her, she turns and there's nothing in the room.

She sits with Leah on the portico and smokes and smokes and smokes.

She's doesn't go back inside the house until everyone is awake and it's time to get dressed and go home.

She doesn't mention it.

They don't talk about it.

* * *

Her mother is going on tour in a month with the symphony, he father is coming down from Washington for a visit and the obligatory hate-sex with his estranged wife that Violet always seems to hear when they forget about her existence in the other room.

* * *

The next week Violet goes with Leah for her card reading at Billie Dean's. The blonde refuses and tells Leah to get the fuck out.

When Violet asks about it Leah tells her she got caught.

"Doing what?"

"You know how that kid died in the house after he shot up homeroom at Westfield?"

"Yeah."

"Well, his mom comes and sees Billie Dean. And sometimes you need an object of a person's in order to get them to come and talk to you, so I kinda…took it."

"Took what?"

"You know."

"No I don't, Leah, what the fuc-…"

Leah pulls a tissue out of her Chanel and unwraps the ring in it.

"You can feel the energy in it."

"Bitchin." Violet says without feeling, without reaching out to touch it.

"Don't be that way."

"How much have you had today?" ADD meds are pharmaceutical speed and Leah's new flavor of the week.

"Oh, fuck you."

"Fuck _you_."

"You see him yet?"

"Who?"

She holds up the ring.

"You _must_ be fucking high."

"I'm not," Leah hisses. "I saw him."

"Okay."

"The house is like a supernatural magnet, and magnets draw energy and if you know what you're doing you can use it to your advantage. You'll see. Don't worry. We did everything right."

"How? Is a wallet full of hundred dollar bills going to appear in my bag?"

"You asked for money?"

"No."

"You get what you ask for."

"I can't fucking believed you let her kill that fucking cat."

Leah shrugs.

"Don't blame me, I just told her we'd need to do a whole blood sisters finger prick but she decided the cat would be better and just fucking did it before I knew she was going to. It worked out better anyway. It usually takes longer to see a sign."

"Uh-huh."

Violet remembers cleaning up Leah's blood too that night, she's sure finger pricks were all Leah had in mind.

"You'll see, okay?"

"We'll see you fucking klepto, you stole a dead woman's last memento of her dead kid. That's fucked up."

Leah shrugs, again.

"Well her baby boy pump-actioned out fifteen brains, so whatever. I'm hungry. Are you mad at me?"

"Yeah."

"I'll buy you food."

"Good, bitch."

"But I promised to pick Chloe up from practice, her boy bailed on her."

"You are not driving."

"Yeah, I'm fucking blitzed."

"I know, I can tell."

* * *

It feels like someone's got fingers in her sternum. Dread. She sees him, across the field standing by the bleachers. He waves at her, just once and walks behind the bleachers. It could be anyone. She knows that. But, she doesn't believe that either.

They throw Chloe up and she's laughing, they are all chanting one of their stupid cheers. When the wind blows the cradle will rock when the bough breaks the cradle will fall and down will come cradle baby and all. That's just about how it goes. Somebody buckles and one side of girls trip over each other, Chloe rolls off outstretched arms and lands with her head under her neck.

There's a meaty snap.

Biting a heavy bone in a piece of chicken, kind of.

Violet opens her mouth and a stunted sound comes out, gut and throat sound, an 'ah' soft and hard and that's it, she's standing up and then she just sits down while everyone crowds around Chloe, who is definitely dead. Someone screams shrill and dramatic, a stupid girl scream. She expects that when the group clears all that will be left is bones, the thought sticks.

She goes and looks.

She's corralled away when the cheerleading coach runs up with school security and a gym teacher who's an EMT.

Everyone has to wait for their parents to come and get them, they all sit in the gym and voices buzz like flies. A middle aged hall pass checker yells her name, her mother is standing against the silver push handle of the heavy gym door in big dark sunglasses and an off the shoulder sweater, she has the dog with her.

They walk out to the car in silence. Her mother hands her the dog across the armrest.

"Violet, I'm sorry about your friend." They merge onto the highway.

"Yeah. She's dead." Violet tells her that's she's left the blinker on.

"I'm sorry."

"I know."

"Are you okay?"

"Pretty shitty, actually."

Hayley sits on her lap and she scratches the dog's head, rubs its belly.

She's expecting to see him staring out from the backseat window of another car, but he isn't. Its awhile before she sees him again.

Everyone is at the wake. Violet doesn't go to the funeral, just stays home and smokes out her bedroom window, counting the number of cars in the funeral procession as they go down the street and loop around, remembering belatedly that it's bad luck to count and that you're supposed to hold your breath as a hearse goes by. She says déjà vu under her breath, but realizes the similarity is from a thought of immolation and loud grief she had once.

Leah calls her and says her and Stephanie are coming to get her to go to the Stapleton household for hard drinks and soft sweet sample cakes that people send when people die.

Chloe's parents sit side by side, one of them just had to bury one of their parents and Violet stares at them from across the fray. Leah wants to go back to her house and try to Ouija Chloe. Violet blows her off and calls her dad after pressing her mother's name in her phone before realizing her mother left for tour yesterday. Her mother offered to take her with for the month and she's wondering why she didn't say yes as she stands outside and the wind blows cold through her nylons.

She smokes and waits for her father to come in his new shiny black Lincoln, he bought it after the divorce. He wears suits now, lectures around at colleges, fucks interns and secretaries and bright eyed psych students who give him the attention and praise he thinks he deserves.

They smoke in silence as they drive to some restaurant her father says was a new discovery last week when he first rolled in.

He says 'rolled in' so casually she can't help but think it's affected to seem younger.

He says he's sorry about her friend.

She tells him they weren't really that close.

They weren't, not really. She's not close to anyone.

Chloe's parents sue the school for lack of safety measures and the fact that the coach wasn't supervising the practice, they win, the cheerleading coach is fired and things go back to normal.

The gymnasium is redone and school administration puts a memorial plaque on a shelf in a glass cabinet next to pictures of Chloe in her uniform and her pom poms.

_'Recognition_.'

* * *

They have chemistry together, water is special. It doesn't scatter like other things, like mercury. Water is tensile. There's a special type of bond that is the weakest but if enough connections exists it becomes versatile, and that's how plastic cling-wrap works. She only takes the gist of the three hour lab experiment away, bullshits her way through the procedural write-up. Stephanie covers her eyes while she's at the computers desk that makes her feel like she's working at a bank.

"Boo."

"Get off."

"You're a pissy polly today."

"You sound weird."

"Yeah I know. Got it pierced." Stephanie sticks out her swollen tongue and shows off the barb accessory.

"Very cool," Violet says with no real impact.

"You wanna play doubles with me and Leah and that foreign bitch?"

"What foreign bitch."

"The adoptive Russian orphan."

"Oh, she is a fucking bitch. Won't do it. She sat down on the court the other day when I played her in practice."

"Why?"

"I kept hitting it out of court."

"How come?"

"It was windy."

"Or you suck."

"I do not suck."

Stephanie pretends to suck a dick and the girl at the computer at the end of the row snickers. Violet smiles.

"That why you got your tongue meat pierced?"

"Who says that? Weirdo."

"I'll play doubles, just not with her."

"Okay I'll find someone."

But she doesn't find anyone. Violet is the best of the three and plays one-sided, they volley awkwardly at first but her serves are violent pops and racket lashes with a fast spin. A ball hits her hard in the tit, she winces and clutches her chest, her nipple stings inside her sweaty sports bra.

Stephanie chortles and sputters, bowed over and hanging onto her ribs. Leah cackles. She lobes her last ball at them with no real force, still laughing.

* * *

That same weekend she does her first line with Leah, off the back of her theatre textbook. They make-out.

Leah's mouth tastes bitter, it's hot and messy, there's sticky lipgloss on her cheeks and chin and her panties are a wet mess as they rub against her crotch and Leah's wrist that's sandwiched between her legs.

They frot wildly, rubbing back and forth on the other's thigh, twin orgasms and open mouths, lips moving like worms.

Neither of them wants to cut their nails to finger the other but Leah goes down on her, slippery tongue deft but getting sloppy, Violet doesn't think she's ever been so wet before, the orgasm is weak but she tingles between her legs for an hour afterwards.

They fuck around all night and Leah does another line, Violet smokes and gets ashes all over the bed sheets.

Leah pushes her off when she's nipping at her breasts, tonging each nipple, biting too hard. It makes her angry, something feels cracked and sharp inside of her. Rage, she thinks. Leah's got a low tolerance for pain and for some reason it makes Violet hate her more.

* * *

It's supposed to be winter. Not here. It never snows in L.A. Violet goes along to the party the symphony is throwing. She drinks champagne and her mother dances with one of the guys who does security for them. She looks happy.

Whenever Violet finds herself in a place sitting somewhere on her own looking into a crowd she thinks that she's going to see him again. She's watched horror movies and read creepypastas and hung around the occult shop enough to think that something is going to happen, to know it will. She's going to see him again and the feeling that comes isn't pleasant. Part of her needs it, there has to be a climax and a denouement, one stab wound doesn't ever kill anyone.

She has more champagne.

Her mother and her have a silent Christmas at their apartment, they're both a little hungover. She has a bloody mary at the small dinette table and her mother smokes one of her cigarettes. She looks old without her make-up on. Harsh in the awful kitchen lighting. Violet wants something to happen.

Some days make her so sick of everyone she wants to kill herself. Open her throat with a razor she hasn't used since she was fifteen and her parents made her go talk to someone.

Her mother had miscarried again and Violet had to clean up all the blood while her father had rushed her mother to the hospital, her father signed the divorce papers her mother's attorney had handed him after the hospital discharge.

Something needs to happen, her life has always been broken up by horrible things. It's what she expects.

* * *

Her and Leah are invited to Stephanie's New Year's party.

The something she's been waiting for happens.

She's going around a corner after climbing the stairs to find the second bathroom because someone's getting a blowjob in the one downstairs and she really has to pee. Her sight is quickly overtaken by black cotton. Someone's chest is in her line of vision and she sidesteps to avoid collision.

But they move too and they're playing shuffle-shuffle, she looks up to scowl and it's him. He smiles, a hint of teeth and sinister despite the dimples, like he's saying 'see you soon,' she looks down and there's just her feet, she looks up and he's gone.

Someone laughs and someone else oh-my-gods something down the hall, and then there are other little snippets of conversation and outcry and she sees Stephanie. She watches dispassionate in the open doorway as Stephanie has a seizure in the midst of throwing up as she's pissing her pants, a nursing student rushes forward screaming about ambulances and turning off the music and _help, HELP_!

Too late. They get her heart pumping again with an AED that conducts off of her tongue piercing. Her mouth is burned with electricity marks, her tongue is a mess. Violet sees it lolling out of her mouth, bleeding and awful smelling.

She visits Stephanie in the hospital, she isn't dead but, really, it's a pillow over the face situation or would be if her parents weren't squeamish or Catholic.

A toaster oven is higher functioning than her now.

She becomes the poster girl for D.A.R.E. in the middle school population and a hot topic in homeroom and then the story of Stephanie Boggs passes into urban legend.

_'Fame.'_

* * *

They are walking past Billie Dean's shop when a well dressed woman with a blond up-do walks out staring across the street as if she's see a ghost.

She has. Her son is sitting on the bench outside the pizza place, one black boot balanced on the opposite knee, arm stretched out along the back length of the bench. He raises a hand in greeting, Violet sees him. Leah sees him, sees her see him too. For a moment they all stand silent, watching him. Billie Dean is behind them.

Go away.

He's gone.

"I told you not to come here." Billie is talking to Leah and the mother of a dead boy puts the pieces together, she screeches and goes for Leah, whirling out of the open door, pissed off, she pulls at Leah and rips the purse out of her hands, upturning it onto the sidewalk and down on her knees searching for what's landed at Violet's feet.

She screaming for Leah to give it back. _Where is it!? You bitch, you fucking bitch! Where is it?_

The wad of tissue is right there, what the woman wants is in it. Violet puts her foot down over it to hide it from view and the woman who is the mother of a dead psycho stands up with the sharp little manicure file from Leah's bag.

She's going for Leah's eyes and ends up digging the point in the meat of Leah's cheek, dragging it down. Violet's reaching out and grabbing the woman's hair, and then she's hitting her over and over again with the glass Snapple bottle in her hand.

Leah's face is bloody and so is the woman's and helpful onlookers separate them all, the police come.

Her own mother is angry, Leah's parents are calm. Leah wants to press charges and sue with a hissed: 'look at what she did to my _fucking face_."

Leah's uncle is a lawyer, Violet hears that the settlement is going to be H-U-G-E but all the times she talks to Leah on her phone and puts off plans with another text messaged apology and excuse she's twisting the ring that doesn't fit her fingers around and around on her thumb. When she cards her hands through her hair it snags, hard.

She puts it on a chain and wears it.

It makes her feel stronger, in control of the situation. One night she wakes up and sees something standing at the foot of her bed. Her heart stutters and stammers between her lungs. It's gone. Was never there, maybe.

It was.

It was.

**It was.**

* * *

She takes the murder house tour sans Leah. She roams away and hides under a cleaning cart until they close. She'd had to ditch school, right after swim. Her bathing suit is chafing the sides of each breast and the edges of her groin.

She doesn't know what she's looking for but she's tired of waiting.

Patience has never been her thing, she was a spoiled child. Only kid syndrome. Want, take, have. Need it now. Getting her way every time.

* * *

There's blood on the doorknob, dried already and she still opens the door. She's not scared, _not scared not scared not scared_. But she's shaking on the stairs and can't find the bannister and she misses a step and then her head is hurting and her hearing pinholes and her vision is lacking its peripherals and she's passing out which sounds better than fainting but is really the same fucking thing.

She comes around. Her head still hurts, she doesn't think she can climb stairs and all she wants to do is go home. There aren't any answers here, not ones she wants. She should be sitting next to Stephanie in the hospital while she drools on herself or leaving Leah another message on her phone because she's starting to get worried that she hasn't answered her phone or replied to any texts for the last two days.

There's another door, she leaves but she feels like she's forgotten something and then she back in the kitchen, it feels like the back of her neck is sweaty but when she looks at her fingers, they're red and when she touches the knot in her hair she winces. It hurts, she's bleeding and her mom is going to freak the fuck out. She should have grabbed a sweatshirt with a hood to hide the damage until she can decide if it's really that bad or not.

The basement door is closed.

She can remember seeing the light in the hallway while she was in the basement.

There's blood on the doorknob, dried already and she still opens the door. She's not scared, _not scared not scared not scared_. But she's shaking on the stairs and can't find the bannister and she misses a step…she catches herself and sees that there's blood on the floor where she fell.

And then something is shoving her back down the stairs. Did she even really fall the first time?

She starts violently and he's there.

"You're awake." He sounds so fucking happy.

Her head hurts, should have grabbed the one with the hood. Her mom is going to freak the fuck out. It must be late now, past her curfew. "I need to go home, my mom's going to kill me."

"No."

"I have to _go_."

"You can't just leave, Violet."

"Watch me, asshole." But she can't get up. Her legs are all sprawled out, unnatural, like a pile of sticks.

"Oh shit!"

"You'll be okay, promise." He nuzzles into her neck. "_Violet_."

He kisses her neck.

Her cheek.

Her mouth, too. Her lips squirm under his, her hands reaching up to smack him away. Her head hurts, she wonders if she's going to faint again, her spine is in shock. It happens a lot of the time with people who fall or are in car accidents. For a while the lower body doesn't work. Fake paralysis. She knows, she just has to calm down.

He smiles.

"You'll be okay, it'll be okay later. It takes a while."

"Spinal shock. I know. Get me out of here."

"You broke it, Vee."

"No." She's crying already, shaking her head. It hurts, the spot that's bleeding so badly.

"Shhh. I _promise_ it will be fine. It took you an hour to come back the first time. But the second time was faster."

"What second time?"

"You're not so good with stairs." He says it like a whispered conspiracy secret.

"What? Just shut up, take me home. Please. _Please_."

"I can't do that."

"Are you going to kill me?"

"No."

"Tate, " she says his name. The first time she's ever said it. Tate, it's his name. Tate Langdon. "I need to go."

"You can't."

It's so stupid, she's crying. His mouth is back on her cheek and she's shaking harder. And he ruts against her, and her brain solders all the information together: this boy, this _thing_ that ruined Stephanie, killed Chloe, and maimed Leah is going to fuck her.

She doesn't care, she just wants it to be fast and over with, she's just so angry now. Hysterical. She can't feel anything, just the scrape of cement on her skin where the nerves are still working, his weight, the pressure of his chest against hers, his mouth, the dampness of his grazing teeth and the wet sloppiness of his tongue on her carotid.

She feels the bulge of his erection through his jeans and through her sweatpants.

"I'm sorry."

She hears him take his shirt off and she can smell boy-sweat with its sweetness and salt. She wants to throw up from her head being moved as he pushes the bundle of fabric right under the torn part of her scalp.

"Please, just leave me alone."

"I will make it feel so good, so fucking good, next time. I just..., I can't yet. You're the only one left and then it'll be okay, I'll be able to then."

"Able to do what?"

She looks at him, he puts his hand over her eyes.

"Don't look at me, I can't make them go away yet. After this, I promise you'll never have to see them again. After this it'll all be finished."

"Finished?"

"Our deal."

"I never made a deal with you."

His chest is a mess, blood that she thinks is hers and then really looks at, finding that it's not flowing. Holes and tacky blood, the acrid scent of bullets and burned skin. He presses it against hers after he unzips her sweatshirt, smearing old blood against the dampness of her neoprene.

"You wanted me to love you. I didn't want it to be this way, I wanted it to be good and special but I can only do what you let me do. You didn't give me anything that night so I couldn't take anything from you, you died first, when I'm in you and you die you'll come back the same."

She doesn't understand.

He helpfully supplies the answer.

"A virgin."

He's thumbs each perked nipple that's answered to the cold in the basement with lazy ease.

"Wait."

His hands pull away and rest in the blood that halos her head, "I'm sorry, I scared you." He puts a bloody palm print on her skin, rubs his thumb across her bottom lip and she winces expected the sharp catch of his ring, "No, just…," she turns her head away as his mouth settles above her own, she startles and her wide eyes make him draw back an inch.

"I have something for you."

"Violet, I can't take something from you."

He says it slow as if she's a child, and the hand with a pinch on the chain around her neck falls just a little before she raises her arm again, as much as she can, "But it's not mine in the first place, you're taking something from me that was never mine, it's yours, your mom had it and Leah took and when Leah had it I took it. See?" She tugs on the chain and his ring swings into sight, rapidly between their faces.

His face goes pugnacious.

She knows.

She _knew_.

She remembers Leah saying _'Sometimes you have to lie to make people feel better about themselves.'_

He has to take his ring back, but he doesn't want to. He wants to fuck her, rape her, _love_ her.

_Love is gentle, love is kind._

But he isn't.

He's a maniac.

Dead, too.

She laughs weakly, disbelieving and he looks like he's going to hit her. He sits back on his heels.

"Yeah, I see." He yanks on the chain and it rasps across her skin, burning. He looks at it in his hand before the chain slips to the cement and he puts it on.

Slowly he leans in and picks her head up by the hair, it hurts her scalp, and he smashes head into the cement until she's dead.

* * *

Something is touching her face, cold, something pinches and she makes a sound and it goes away, it feels like there's a scratch on her cheek from it.

There is.

She wakes up for a fourth time, but it's the first time she realizes she's been dead the last three.

* * *

**A/N:** There's a second part, promise. Miss you guys, miss writing fanfic, working on a book.


	2. Chapter 2

**Title:** Six crows, seven sneezes, and Saturdays flowers for Wednesday's child

**Author:** grayglube

**Summary:** Superstition and caution only go as far as stupidity allows.

**Rating:** M

**Warning(s)/Kink(s):** Language, violence, sexual situations, elements of non-con and dub-con, necrophilia

**A/N:** Okay this chapter feels like a collection of smutlets to me, and it is, smutlets with implied smut. It's heavy on the dub-con/non-con theme.

* * *

"Tate?"

He's sitting on the floor, head between his knees, wrists over his knees, hands hanging like limp pale spiders, "What?"

"…" She looks at his hands and swallows. His head lifts and he's looking at her, blank, expressionless.

"What?"

"Talk to me."

"About _what_?"

"Why can't I leave."

"It doesn't let you unless you're collecting."

The house.

"What do you go out and collect for it?"

"What do you think?"

"Souls."

His eyes widen for affect and he adopts disbelief in his face to mock her more when he says, "Wow, you're pretty smart."

"Fuck you."

She's leaving the room and he's behind her, she just hears the floor creak before his hands are on her shoulder and opposite wrist.

"I was going to."

She screeches a little, angry, and he's dragged back by something invisible, stumbling as he steadies himself on the wall. She smirks a little, "Yeah, you were."

"…" His posture promises violence but his face is blank again

"Guess you can't _collect_ unless it lets you."

She turns out of the room with a spin he's behind her again, standing, unmoving, a statue that changes where it is once you've blinked, "Who says?"

"You would have done it already."

"Changed my mind."

"Bullshit."

"Don't get cocky."

He moves closer and touches her face with an open palm, soft, subtle. Ballsy.

"What if I don't want you to do that?"

He's jerked back against the wall.

"And what if I want to?"

Violet basket handles him, her little hand between his legs, cupping, fingers stretching out like a cats claws.

"Was waiting for that."

He perks forward with his hips and his mouth, he gets there for a second and he's forced back by something she has no control over.

Violet turns away, meaning to go now that he knows she's not scared and starts walking.

"Killing you isn't off limits whether you like it or not."

His hands are claming her arms to her sides and he's pushing her down the hall, kicking open a door and holding her against him as he opens a window, picks her up and while she's struggling on the ledges he's pushing the screen out, she tries to tell him to wait just one fucking second but it comes out sounding like nothing but squeaky screechy protest and he pushes her out a window. Like it's easy.

It is, she realizes.

He's done it before.

Maybe it's easier with her, knowing she's going to come back.

* * *

She waits until he's finished, breathing heavily and sweating, exertion making him unaware of her or just unconcerned with giving her any sort of attention. She doesn't like it.

He leans against the brick and she sits on the low wall while he labors for a heavy breath.

"Why'd you go out and kill all those kids?"

He tips his head from where it's hanging, damp hair obscuring his face, "This house can make you do some pretty fucked up shit."

"Sure it can."

He spits on the ground. He straightens.

"It wasn't like I woke up one morning and just did it. I grew up here, I was a normal kid, mostly. There are others here, were, while I was growing up. They disappeared because they didn't go out and collect. After awhile I started to think I would just start early. Everybody wants to live forever. Eventually you'll do it to."

His eyes look tired and she scowls, "I won't."

"You're still too fresh, you haven't been here long enough to get it through your head that you don't have a choice." He smiles and shakes his head a little, a spray of salt hits her, like ocean mist. It's hard to think of him as someone whose been dead for over a decade when he's standing in front of her in track shorts and worn sneakers, sweating, breathing.

"…"

She's been watching him. Catching him sprinting back and forth and across the yard, reading a book that shouldn't be in the house, looking at his hand as he raises it above his face staring at his ring, leading an altogether ordinary afterlife.

"But once you do, it's easy."

"…"

He puts his hands on her knees and open them, stepping between her legs, "It's so fucking easy, Vee." She pulls up her knees and presses the soles of her shoes into his stomach, thighs opening and closing like an accordion, pushing with her feet to make him step away.

"Back off and don't call me that."

He laughs, rueful, wry. She wonders idly as she puts her hands down between her thighs on the brick and scrapes her nails along the grit in the mortar where he gets his clothes, she's been wearing her sweats and bathing suit since she's been stuck. She wants a pair of underwear and some jeans.

She won't ask about clothes, she'll figure it out herself without his help.

* * *

Her dad comes, he takes the tour and they don't mention her but in his head he's thinking about how she died, where it happened, adding details to it, seeing it.

He says her name and it's like tonguing an electrical outlet.

Once you summon a ghost they're liable to start following you around.

At first it's hard, but it's the red string of fate around her little finger, or fishing wire dug into the skin and rasping across bone, and she just follows it outside the house until she sees her dad.

She lets him see her, he walks towards her and when the car hits him it's comical.

Violet has never been daddy's girl and she's hated her father for a long time.

In a moment it's like a line of coke hitting her system. She's fucking high. Flying by the time she's back at the house because she's done collecting and now she has to wait for someone else to say her name.

Tate's sprawled on the stairs ambivalent, sedate, smirky.

She's flying and she wants to hear him say her name.

She grabs his hair when she's standing close enough to reach it with her hand, a stair below him with a foot between his thighs. She yanks on it and he struggles to pull himself closer to her, unsteady and legs akimbo before his converse find purchase on the stair edge and he's kneeling. He looks good and she kisses him before she lets him go, he falls forward a bit when she moves to the side and mounts the stairs, he watches her go, all angry eyes and violent promise.

When she wakes up she's realized she'd fallen asleep instead of just lost time. Her school bag and uniform are by and on the desk chair across the room. Rewards for being a good prisoner, she thinks.

Even her iPod comes back to life after it's died.

The House provides.

* * *

"So how does it work?"

"How does what work?"

"Talking to that psychic, Billie Dean."

"I can hear her, in my head. And I answer."

"Do you think she'd ever come here? If someone asked her too, like your mom, I mean."

"She's too smart for that. She's scared of me, like my mother is scared of me."

"What if I said I was scared of you too, do you think she would come to help?"

"…"

"What? Don't get creepy, it was just a question."

"Are you scared?"

"Yes."

"Of me?"

"You know more about this place than I do. I don't like that."

"She might come, if I helped. That's what you want, right? You want her to come and then you want to go out and get her."

"It's her fault, all of it."

"You blame everyone except yourself, you know that?"

_Love._

It's what she wanted.

Love is vicious, she thinks.

Love is spiteful, she continues.

"I don't need your help."

"Yes you do. I could just tell her what you're planning on doing to her and she won't come."

"Or she'll think you're lying and come anyway."

He smiles. Predatory.

"My help doesn't come for free, _Vee_."

* * *

He wears her down.

Day by day. Week by week. Finally months have gone by and one day something about everything is foggy and she knows she can't put it off, she's scared and she doesn't want to lose herself just like she didn't want to die in the first place.

But she waits, knows that he's going to come to her anyway.

At least she doesn't have to keep her vile distaste from showing when he takes off his shirt, his wounds are gone. For now. He looks like a real boy instead of Addam's Family paperboy, she laughs on accident and he raises an eyebrow.

They have words and then he's got her hanging out the window, hands hard on her calves, keeping her from falling.

"Have you made a decision yet?"

"Pull me up and I'll tell you."

"Tell me or I'll drop you."

"Then drop me."

She stops trying to hold her weight up and he startles a little before holding tighter.

He doesn't drop her. He's too worried about how she'll come back from another fall out a window when she's already falling apart.

He's deranged and his dick is hard, she can feel it while they sit under the window,

_'help me'_

She says it, softly. She's numbly aware of him staring hard at her, his hand tender and warm on her face and then his eyes happy, bright, his smile pleased.

It's like it isn't real. In some ways it isn't. She's dead anyway and what she is now isn't who she really is.

He nods and collects on her words, fucks her on the floor and afterwards lies spent on his back playing with her hair. She stares at the ceiling and thinks about how she's lost her virginity feeling like she wasn't present for the activity at all, hopes it's worth it. Hopes he's a better actor than deflowerer. His hands get annoying, grabby, careless, and she sits up and puts on her underwear.

There's anger and hate on his face, shaping his mouth into ugly shapes.

"I just fucked you."

"So what?"

"You don't even care."

There's an unsaid accusation there, in his tone. He wants to call her some nasty name, something like slut, but he won't. He can't really. Not with his dick smeared with evidence of her previously pristineness.

"Why should I?"

He looks hurt.

It makes her feel good.

"You should."

"You're the only one who had a choice." There's venom in her mouth from saying the words. He's broken something human in her. Dirtied her up in more ways than he can see.

His face slackens and she glances at him before pulling her shirt over her head.

"I'm sorry."

She huffs. He's ambivalent to his state of undress, propped up just so on the floor to look like someone pushed him there. As she turns his hand snags her shirt, teeth on the back of her neck like she's a cub who needs to come back to the cave.

"Stay." He's countering because she's hurt him in some way, fragile male ego in need of reaffirmation of in-charge-ness.

He pets her and prods in ways she know he thinks is supposed to turn a girl on and guides her to the bed so he can get inside of her again. He keeps her against him for a long time and when his dick is pressing hot and damp between the flare of underdeveloped ischial crests she heaves a dry sob, she doesn't want to do it again.

But they do and she can't stand his mouth or his hands, pawing, pressing, sucking on her skin. He'll leave a mark. She sighs loudly and tries to fain boredom to replace and push away everything else she feels that is in complete contrast to the good time he's having.

"I'll help you. You know? Anything you want."

"You're heavy, get off me."

He mouths at her shoulder, humid heat, like an annoying dog panting on her.

"I can't do it again."

Not that her opinion matters.

She winces.

He pretends not to notice.

When she gets up she clings to the bed frame breathing heavily, he's reaching out to steady her and she slaps him away because his hands are groping and sweaty and unpleasant.

"God, what is wrong with you?"

She hurts, badly. Lolita all torn up by Humbert Humbert, like being fondled by a fucking ape. She wants to die but she'd just come back a virgin and end up in the same condition she is now just because she has nowhere else to go and neither does he.

* * *

"She's here." He's got the same look as he did lying on the floor in the aftermath of leaving her bloody between the thighs and filling her up with something stickier than the orgasm he'd had inside of her, hate, darkness, everything else he's got in him that she was hungry for but too well trained to eat without someone force-feeding it to her while she was alive.

The woman downstairs is perfectly coiffed, careful with bright well-manicured nails. Violet makes sounds in other rooms, pulling on the strings of her little spider-web, ready to spin around the fly as it finds the center of the skein.

"Violet?"

"Billie."

The medium realizes what she's done, but she doesn't run out of the house. Knows it will do her no good. She looks at Violet and walks away, out the door and into the car. She drives away and Violet lets her.

Soon.

She's only after one thing now.

In the mid-game of chess she can think five or six moves ahead with all the pieces left, she's got an I.Q. that's guaranteed her things that moral virtue and money can't supply on their own. People are easier than chess. They move slower. Billie will castle Leah and bring everything into endgame. Rooks, crows, murder, her mind does math of black and white squares and the patterns of pieces left behind.

Queen takes Rook. Check.

King moves.

Bishop moves. Check.

King moves.

Queen moves. Check.

And it doesn't matter whether Leah lays down to die or is felled like a tree. Blood spurting from the roots, chop chop.

Leah always thought she was smart but Violet always _knew_ she was smarter.

* * *

She stands behind his mother's chair as she sits with Billie. To her credit the medium doesn't even flinch. She politely calls the session to an end and Violet takes Constance's vacated, but still warm with human body heat.

"There's nothing you can do to me here."

Violet already knows that, she's looked at the floor, chalk and ash in a circle around the dinette kitchen set refurbished to look spell-shop chic.

"I won't do anything to you. I just want Leah."

"I don't blame you."

"So…what do you want to do?"

"I'm not going to help you."

"I don't need your help, not really. I just need you to go away for a while and not talk to anyone."

"And if I don't?"

"I will kill you and leave your body for Leah to find and she'll come around on her own. Later, rather than sooner."

"I could just banish you."

"No, you can't."

"Who says?"

"Tate."

"Tate."

"Yeah. He gets chatty postcoital."

"You weren't lying when you called out."

She tried to get through to the psychic hotline while Tate pressed her up against a wall and slid a hand up the back of her skirt, pulling at her underwear. Just a quickie while lookie-lous passed by on the Murder House tour, he has a voyeuristic streak.

"We embellished the situation. It's more or less compulsory. No crazy attempts to turn me into a docile sex slave, yet."

She rubs at the sore spot, left by him, on her neck. She's got hickeyed spots all over, mood ring leopard marks set on dusky blue and purple stuck somewhere between fear and calm, spots of bursted red to denote excitement.

"I'm so sorry, Violet."

"We'll call it even if you leave, you're not the one I want dead."

* * *

"Tate."

"What?"

She doesn't like his tone, irritated like he was doing something important. She's never liked being ignored.

When she kisses him it's a surprise, it's an even bigger one when he pushes her off.

"What are you doing?"

"Don't do that again."

She can play the dangerous one too.

She kisses him and he's wary, always wary of a knife she may have behind her back. Another kiss and she pushes him back onto the bed and lifts her dress, lets it flutter down from her fingers to the floor, straddles him and fills her hands with his hair and ruts against his jeans.

His breathe is foggy and warm on her skin, a bra still has yet to appear for her to wear, she's lucky she even has the choice to forgo underwear. She's wearing a pair now but usually tries to anticipate whether or not he's in the mood to rip them off her, he's _always_ in the mood.

"Suck my tits, I like that."

The marks he'd left are gone already. His head doesn't follow the push of her fingers against his scalp and instead of compliance he's all fight and confusion.

"What are you doing?"

He jerks his head back and goes limp underneath her. Confused, uninterested like she's mistaken him for someone else and he's trying to clue her in.

She sits up and strokes the skin under his shirt, he removes her fingertips with a hand around her wrist and his palm sliding up her arm and sternum and chin and cheek, thumb pulling at her bottom lip, she kisses it and sighs, slumping a little.

He repeats his question.

She grabs his thumb and twists, "So when I want it we can't do it? Fucking rapist."

She pins down his arms with her knees and strangles him. She makes a sound in her throat, trapped screaming, once he's stopped moving and digging his nails into her legs.

His dick is hard and they're dead anyway, it's kind of hot, actually. Really hot. He won't come before she does and ruin the mood more.

* * *

"You killed me." He sounds a part bitter, a part rumbling amusement, like some whimsical cocktail combination. She blows smoke from the corner of her mouth, "We're both dead."

"…"

"I want Leah."

His expression changes with a mocking outward breath before he states, like it's a fact that, "She's mine."

"You fucked up with that. Next time she comes, she's _mine_."

Leah's got fame and money and notoriety, power, everything, except it isn't enough. It will never be enough for Leah. Eventually she'll be back to survey the damage. Eventually what happened to Billie Dean will be too much of an unsolved mystery for her not to come around.

* * *

They're both outside, the neighbors have a sprinkler on, the hedges and lawn are starting to bog with waterlogged grassless patches of mud, it waves over onto their side. She doesn't mind it spraying down on her, it's hot, muggy. The heat is disorienting.

She goes inside with wet hair and smokes from her perch on the kitchen island. Tour hours are ending and a couple is detaching itself from the final go-around to kiss sloppily in the hall.

_"Thy lover is a soldier, and Cupid hath his camp."_

"Love." She scoffs.

He leans against the opposite counter, one shoulder humped higher than the other, converse sneakers crossed. His eyes swivel over towards her, under the fall of his fringe it looks sinister.

"I saw _you_ write it, saw you thinking it was stupid and dumb and then write it anyway. You were honest."

"So what?"

He straightens and steps forward, hands grasping the edge on either side of her thighs, he coos "Just shut up." He tugs on her hand, making her drop the cigarette that's resting between her fingers. Her mouth drops open a fraction and she cants her head a bit, unconscious of it, he grins, cheeks dimpling, "Yeah, that's it. Come here."

She doesn't mind it, his tongue in her mouth, pushing, prodding, hot and slick. What she does mind is the way a hand slips down the back of her sweatpants and the other trying to worm its way down the top of her bathing suit. She detaches from his mouth and hands and shoves him a footstep away from her with her bare feet.

"Why are you so grabby? God." She rubs her scalp and smoothes down her hair.

"You don't want to do it?"

"Stop trying to get your dick wet."

"What's that supposed to mean? That's what fucking is about."

"I don't want to fuck."

"Then what the fuck are you doing?"

"Can't you just touch me without shoving it in the second it's possible?"

"You know what? Sometime you're like fucking a rag doll."

"Why should I want to fuck you? You don't even do it right."

He grins and knocks away her outstretched leg. When she pulls them back up to her chest to really kick him he grabs her feet and tugs her almost completely off the kitchen island. His fingers snare around one ankle, a thumb strokes her in-step. It feels good by itself but it's irritating and annoying while she's pissed off at him.

"So? What do you want me to do, make it up to you?"

"Just leave me alone."

She puts her hands behind her and tries to tug her feet away, he pulls and she's sliding.

"What do you want? Just tell me."

"I want you to go away."

He steps between her legs and she presses at his hips with her toes.

"Do you want me to lay you down? Tell you how soft your skin is, how good you smell?"

"Fuck off!"

He catches the hand she tries to scratch his face with. She reaches back and snags a dish towel hanging from the drawer on the other side of island, she smacks him in the face with it. He flings it away and reaches out a hand to tug down the front of her one-piece.

"You told me you liked it when I put your tits in my mouth, suck on your nipples, maybe bite them a little? Huh? What do you want me to do to you, tell me. I'm listening."

"Stop it, you fucking asshole."

The knife block is within reach.

"I'll fuck you any way you want. I'd let you sit on my face, I'd let you _kill_ me again. You like doing that."

"…"

She flicks the paring knife from the block with the airy scrape and metallic ping loud between them.

"I already know what you did, Violet." He kisses her neck, tenderly, not caring about the knife that's gone useless in her limp grip.

"I know you put it in after I was already dead. Did you come? Bet you did."

"I told you to shut the fuck up."

Her face feels hot, swollen.

"Oooh-oh. Did you cry after that too?"

She cuts her arm open, wrist to elbow and he pales. He went too far and now she's cut too deep out of spite.

"Fuck you."

He falters for a moment but then scowls as she's staggering, "Yeah, real fucking mature. Stupid bitch."

She wants to say something scathing, wag a pinky finger and call him little dick or something dumb but her mouth feels like there's a pair of socks shoved in and her hearing goes mute and she bleeds out on the floor.

* * *

**A/N:** I lied, there will be one more part.


End file.
